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BACKGROUND: The traditional job interview process can pose numerous barriers which may disadvantage job seekers on the autism spectrum. Further research is needed to understand the specific dynamics of the interview process that pose the most significant challenges to hiring success and possible ways to remediate these challenges. OBJECTIVE: This qualitative research examined the barriers to, and facilitators of, successful employment interviews from the perspectives of three stakeholder groups: people on the autism spectrum, employers, and service providers. METHODS: We used qualitative content analysis to derive themes from interviews with 23 participants, including individuals on the autism spectrum with job interview experience, employers with experience in interviewing job candidates on the autism spectrum, and service providers who provide employment support to people on the autism spectrum. RESULTS: Five themes emerged across stakeholder groups: (1) navigating unpredictability, (2) introducing flexibility and modifications, (3) relationship-building strategies, (4) importance of self-awareness and self-advocacy, and (5) nuances of Self-disclosure. Across the themes, participants described how to modify the interview process to be more inclusive of neurodiversity. CONCLUSION: We conclude with how rehabilitation service providers can more effectively provide direct services to individuals on the autism spectrum and consult with employers on workplace policies and practices to enhance neurodiversity inclusion. 

Computer-based job interview training, including virtual reality (VR) simulations, have gained popularity in recent years to support and aid autistic individuals, who face significant challenges and barriers in finding and maintaining employment. Although popular, these training systems often fail to resemble the complexity and dynamism of the employment interview, as the dialogue management for the virtual conversation agent either relies on choosing from a menu of prespecified answers, or dialogue processing is based on keyword extraction from the transcribed speech of the interviewee, which depends on the interview script. We address this limitation through automated dialogue act classification via transfer learning. This allows for recognizing intent from user speech, independent of the domain of the interview. We also redress the lack of training data for a domain general job interview dialogue act classifier by providing an original dataset with responses to interview questions within a virtual job interview platform from 22 autistic participants. Participants’ responses to a customized interview script were transcribed to text and annotated according to a custom 13-class dialogue act scheme. The best classifier was a fine-tuned bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model, with an f1-score of 87%. 

Employment outcomes for autistic 1 individuals are often poorer relative to their neurotypical (NT) peers, resulting in a greater need for other forms of financial and social support. While a great deal of work has focused on developing interventions for autistic children, relatively less attention has been paid to directly addressing the employment challenges faced by autistic adults. One key impediment to autistic individuals securing employment is the job interview. Autistic individuals often experience anxiety in interview situations, particularly with open-ended questions and unexpected interruptions. They also exhibit atypical gaze patterns that may be perceived as, but not necessarily indicative of, disinterest or inattention. In response, we developed a closed-loop adaptive virtual reality (VR)–based job interview training platform, which we have named Career Interview Readiness in VR (CIRVR). CIRVR is designed to provide an engaging, adaptive, and individualized experience to practice and refine interviewing skills in a less anxiety-inducing virtual context. CIRVR contains a real-time physiology-based stress detection module, as well as a real-time gaze detection module, to permit individualized adaptation. We also present the first prototype of the CIRVR Dashboard, which provides visualizations of data to help autistic individuals as well as potential employers and job coaches make sense of the data gathered from interview sessions. We conducted a feasibility study with 9 autistic and 8 NT individuals to assess the preliminary usability and feasibility of CIRVR. Results showed differences in perceived usability of the system between autistic and NT participants, and higher levels of stress in autistic individuals during interviews. Participants across both groups reported satisfaction with CIRVR and the structure of the interview. These findings and feedback will support future work in improving CIRVR’s features in hopes for it to be a valuable tool to support autistic job candidates as well as their potential employers.